Filming Years 1910s
by zecoathediesel
Summary: Part two of the Filming Years. Stars are being born, movies are going to a new home, a racist film brakes new grounds, and Hollywood goes to war.
1. Introduction

Now that movies theaters and companies and studios are continuing to grow, we're having more people getting into the films industry, however Thomas Edison didn't like the idea of competition in a business and he was doing anything he can to make sure there was no competition by making people either go out of business or controlling their business, and in some cases the lawsuits he would filed did work for him, but both he and Biograph realize that if they keep arguing no work was going to get done, so they established a company that would lend future directors equipment to make a film if they would follow some rules they have for the directors.

The company that was founded in 1908 was called the Motion Picture Patents Company, also known as Edison Trust. One of the new rules that the company put out was charging exhibitors $2 a week for using one of their movie equipment, and they were not allow to show any films that was not part of the trust like they were not allow to show any films made by independent people and for those that wanted to work for any of the film companies that were part of the Edison Trust, they were limited to one or two reel films, which meant that films had to be 10 to 20 minutes long, because they thought that people's eyes will go bad if they sat still and looked at movie for an hour. They also refuse to give any actors credit for the films they were a part of and they basically wanted to control the film market with the equipment and the studios and the theaters.

From the beginning the company started, people started to fight against the rules by making their own cameras and filming in secret. One of people that started the fight against the MPPC was Carl Laemmle, who made in own company in 1909 called the Independent Moving Picture. The company would do the exact opposite on what the Motion Picture Company set up, they would make more than two reel films, and they would also starting giving actor and actress especially the leading ones screen credit for each film and give them promotion and higher pay. The first two people that would become the first movie stars was Florence Lawrence and King Baggot. Now Florence's case is a interesting one, because she got famous when Carl made up a lie about her being involved in a streetcar accident which was not true.

Anyway, The Motion Picture and Independent Picture kept going head to head with a lot of legal battles to the get away from it all, most of the directors decided to move out west to Los Angeles, California to set their own film studios and own sets. Los Angeles was the perfect place to shoot films, as there were tons of landscapes and the land was cheap to buy and there's was lot of sunshine as well. At the start of 1910 about 5,000 people lived in Hollywood, Los Angeles and new companies started to rise from Fox Corporation, Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros, and by 1912 Carl Laemmle moved from New Jersey to California and formed Universal Pictures.

Now we have not only independent filmmakers making feature films, but we also have feature films from other countries, mostly France, England, and Germany coming to the United States as well. Eventually by 1918, the Motion Picture Patents Company just left after losing many lawsuits from courts.

So now as we get into a new decade, we'll have new actors and actress getting credit and recognition they deserve, new and longer feature films, and more importantly a new filming location in the U.S. that's going to stay forever.


	2. Serial Films

With the strict rule from Edison's Motion Picture Patents Company it was a bit hard for some directors and writers to come up with a story to fit the 10 to 20 minute mark, but even with feature films, there's only so much time you can use to tell your story and sometimes your story might be so long that you have to cut something out to make the movie more suitable for your audiences.

So people like Edison figured, well if I can't fit a whole story into one feature, let's turn this one feature into multiple feature films. These multiple feature films that would continue were the last feature left off would be known as serial films.

These were films that would have a main story or a main plot and that plot would have chapters, sometimes ranging from 12 to 15 to sometimes 20 chapters or even longer and each chapter would have it's own run time, it can be short from 15 mins to as long as about an hour.

These serial films would usually be used for westerns, superheroes, sci-fi, crimes, ect and they were usually cheap films to make, at least during the silent film era, and the plot would mostly be about a hero saving something or someone from the villain and usually they would have what was known as a cliffhanger which was basically like a 'to be continue' type of ending and it would be something like, "Will our hero make it through this trap? Or will the bad guy finally defeat the hero?" And if people wanted to know the ending they would have to wait until the next film to find out.

The earliest known serial film was the Nick Carter detective series released in France in 1908, based on the popular American comic book of the same name, but serial films started to become more popular after the Edison company released _What Happened to Mary_ on July 26, 1912, also based on a popular magazine story of the same name that would also feature cliffhangers at the end of each story. One of Edison's managers, Horace G. Plimpton, was interested with the story and asked the magazine publishers if he could turned these stories into short films and released the films along with the magazine, once it was released it was popular, and helped launch more serial films along the following years, and this serial gained a sequel called _Who Will Marry Mary?_ Released on July 26, 1913.

So throughout the 1910s to the 50s, more serials were released and while some studios would stop making serials films due to the Great Depression causing some studios to filed for bankruptcy because they couldn't transition from silent films to sound films. Other studios, like Republic Pictures, Columbia Pictures, and Universal Pictures transition well into sound films and continue making more serial films, sometimes based on popular superhero comics, like Batman and Superman, but by the time the 50s were here, television was starting to become very popular and almost everyone had a television in their home at some point, so there was no real need to have serial films anymore, so after _Blazing the Overland Trail_ premiered on August 4, 1956, serial films were gone.

Today serial films have been popularized, satirized and even some are still being made with technology. One of the most famous cartoons and shows to satirize serial films were Rocky and Bullwinkle, Danger Island, and Doctor Who. Even some commercials would go the serial film route, like some the cereal commercials or the Cheetos commercials as well. In fact some of the tropes from serial films would carry on to T.V. shows, like the cliffhanger trope and clip shows or in terms of Serial films, recap chapters, which you see in some anime shows.

So while serial films are no longer a thing in terms of movie, there's still some fan made serial films on the internet and while most serial films are lost, the ones that are found are under public domain for anyone to see for free.


	3. Charlie Chaplin

So with more companies joining in on the film craze some studios and people decided what genre would their films mostly be.

Some studios would focus on animated films, others could be focusing on horror films and then there's Mack Sennett's Keystone Studios founded in 1912, the studio that was known for its earliest slapstick comedy genre in movies. Mack Sennett started in the film world as both a star actor and a writer for D.W. Griffith and he stared in Griffith's only slapstick comedy film, _The Curtain Pole_. Released in 1909. After working with Griffith for a few more years, he later left Griffith and Biograph to form his Keystone Studio in Los Angeles. From his learning of film techniques from Griffith, he would use them for his comedy films, such as the Keystone Cops series, his most famous series from the studios, they would mostly be about bubbly cops trying to catch bad guys while funny things would happen, like chase scenes and pratfalls. Some of the biggest stars in Hollywood got their recognition from Keystone Studios, such as Mabel Normand and Fatty Arbuckle, both of which would direct their own films and both of them would later become well known and famous stars in Hollywood especially in the comedy business and one of the most famous comedian star would come out from both Keystone and from Mabel and Arbuckle's films, Charlie Chaplin.

Born on April 16, 1889, Charlie Chaplin started performing when he was 5 years old in Aldershot from Rushmoor, England, then with support from his mother he continue to perform in stage shows and vaudeville's throughout his life, he became so popular in England, that when he went on a tour in America he was invited to join the New York Motion Picture Company and join in on making a film. While reluctant of the idea at first, Chaplin liked the idea of working in the film industry and the saw this as a beginning of a new life, so he agreed and he joined with Keystone picture in his first movie appearance, _Making a Living_ released on February 2nd, 1914. Now while Chaplin himself hated the film, he did receive a nice warm welcome from some critics and reviewers and he stuck around with Keystones for a while and he worked with Mabel Normand and Fatty Arbuckle and while he was at Keystone, Charlie invited a character that would later become his trademark character, "The Tramp." The Tramp is one of the most recognizable characters in all of movie history and it's very simple in its design, it's just Chaplin in a bowler hat, some baggy pants, a cane, a little mustache and it's like he just was born to be on screen.

Other reason that the Tramp character was so popular was it's character. You see the Tramp came in a time where money was slowly starting to become a problem for everyday citizens and here comes this character, a character that's like an everyday man for commend people. No money, looks a bit of a mess, and a bit of a troublemaker, but he also tries to be a gentleman especially around the ladies, and even when things don't go his way, he just leaves such an impression that you can't help but to root for the guy and you're happy when things go right for him.

Charlie Chaplin helped showed people just how a comedy film should be made, he show that if you have a character, a subject for matter or just a simple story and just some wacky or funny situation for your character, then you'll have a good comedy movie. In fact as you'll see in his later films he'll actually develop his Tramp character has the films goes on and he'll show that you can almost make anything into a comedy, but still have a good story.

Though Charlie Chaplin is no longer with us, he'll always be remember as a great actor and a great director and a writer for his films.


	4. Bert Williams

So in the last film history I've wrote about how blacks really had it a bit rough when it came to being on film, most blacks were not allowed to be showed in a movie and if they were then they had to have these character traits or stereotypes that were common back in the day and very rarely would these black actors or actress would ever reach the famous mark to the point where even both black and white audiences would love an respect them, but between 1890s and 1910s we would have our first popular black actor on both stage and in movies named Bert Williams. He was born on November 12, 1874 and started performing for both black and white audiences in minstrel shows along with his good friend, George Walker. They would perform in blackface and used common stereotypes that were known to most audiences at the time, but they did gain a lot of recognizing and did many firsts during their acting career including performing in the first ever all African-American musical play in Broadway, _In Dahomey_ made by Will Marion Cook and it became a huge hit in both US and in the UK so much that it also became the first time that a black musical would have a score published in the UK, but not so much in the US as even though these guys were popular, they were still met with hostility because of their skin color and they still faced racial discrimination.

Still, even though he was facing harsh discrimination in America and after his best friend George Walker passed away in 1911, Williams continue his life as an entertainer and got another major success in Flo Ziegfeld's _Follies_. At first, the white people didn't want a black guy being in an all white cast play, but Ziegfeld wanted Williams in the role, even going so far to say that he can replace every single one of them, except Williams. Thankfully thought, the Broadway was a big hit and once again Williams became a household name to both black and white audience, he was such a big star that he later continued to be in all of Ziegfeld's _Follies_ throughout 1910-1919, while he was staring the Broadway play, he was also chosen to be an actor in some silent films for Biograph, sadly most of them are lost and only two of them survive and can be seen on YouTube. He then later retired from being a filmmaker after he became frustrated with the limitations of primitive and also because Biograph was about to go out of business at this point. After his time in the film industry he went back to later _Follies_ shows and continue to make some more songs, he even made some songs that dealt with Prohibition such as another hit song called _The Moon Shines on the Moonshine_.

He finally passed away on February 27, 1922 at the age of 47. Now while Williams stilled faced a lot of racism and discrimination, he was one of the few African Americans that was very popular among both black and white audiences and his songs were smash hits, so much so that some music artist, like Phil Harris and Johnny Cash would perform some of his hit songs like _Nobody_ and while Williams is not as famous or well remember more than other famous Black actors, like Sidney Potter and Denzel Washington, he did help paved the way for other blacks to join in on the film business and hopefully create and direct their own films and shed some light to the audiences on what the black community is actually like.


	5. Honorable Mentions

In 1916 a filmed called 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, distributed by Universal was the first movie to film in actual underwater. For the location of the underwater, the team choose the Bahamas for its reputation of unusually clear water, and while no actual underwater cameras were used for the film, two brothers under the name, George M. and J. Ernest Williamson, setup a camera system by using watertight tubes and mirrors to get some actual underwater footage from a real life ocean.

In 1913, Nils Granlund produced the first ever trailer in an American theater. While this is not the first time that a film was used to advertise a product, for as early as 1897, the first time that a film was used for an advertisement was for _Admiral Cigarette_ with the tagline, "We all smoke", but this was the first time that a film would advertise for another film in this case the trailer was for an upcoming Charlie Chaplin film in 1914.

Finally in the late 1900's Russia now joins the cinema action as well. Again while a Russia has used a picture camera before the cinema started, in 1908, the first ever Russia narrative film _Stenka Razin_ was release to the public directed by Vladimir Romashkov. Not only that, but also in Russia we have some of the earliest known stop motion animations by a man named Ladislas Starevich, born on August 8, 1882, Starevich was best known for this stop motion work, which he used insects with wires and would created some narrative stories with the character, making this the first time that an animation, in this case stop motion animation, would have a narrative story. Starevich is another one of those animators that not many people talk about and it's a shame, because he's stop motion work is really good. Starevich passed away on February 26, 1965, leaving a bit of legacy behind him and his animated work.


	6. Winsor McCay

Animation, much like any genre of cinema, has its fair share of evolution over the decade. We still have multiple styles of animation, from hand-drawing to stop motion, claymation and of course CGI, but even with the styles we have, almost all of them have to rely on computers or machines one way or the other. Whether it's for budget reasons, or it's the style they choose, or because of a certain scene or special effect they want to have and CGI would be much easier and cheaper to do, but way back in the early ages of animation, animation was probably the most hardest and time consuming project anyone would ever work on. Now that's not to say animation is not time consuming and hard anymore or that movies themselves are not that hard or time consuming in general, but think about, what do you think takes more longer to make, a live action movie with real people and sets that could take you about a year or months or even weeks to complete, depending on how long your movie is, or a movie where you have to constantly keep drawing and drawing but also make those drawings move and put them onto the camera, with no computer? You see when it comes to making an animated film, not only to have to have the skills at drawing or the passion to draw, but you also have to have lots of patience to make an animated film, whether they're shorts or a feature length movie.

So far with the films that were animated most them relied on some sort of trick to them, whether it was putting them in a mirror and spinning them around or just using stop motion as that was how most things that were animated was done at the time. But then one person noticed that his son was playing with a flip book and that flip book gave that person an idea on how to put hand draw animation onto the big screen. That person was none other than Winsor McCay.

Born into Michigan, McCay started his love of drawing when he was just a small boy and he was drawing an aftermath of one of the many fires that hit Spring Lake and he continue is love of drawing ever since. He would draw anything that he saw even drawing something by memory including drawing something he's never seen before.

He later took a job as a reporter-artist for the Cincinnati _Commercial Tribune_. At the time, newspapers did not have the technology yet to reproduce real photographs. So the artist had to retrace or recreate a certain city, place, or a person that was mentioned in the newspaper and it had to be accurate and McCay was the perfect choice for the job.

Later McCay moved to New York with his family and he was employed by James Gordon Bennett Jr. to work for the New York Herald newspaper, from there he took advantage of the newspapers newest and popular sections of the paper, the comic strip sections. His first big comic strip success was _Little Sammy Sneeze_ published on July 24, 1904. It's about a little boy name Sammy whose sneeze are so powerful that almost everything either moves or shakes when he sneezes. The comic strip was popular, but didn't last too long, but it did spawn a few more spin off comic strips, two of which were McCay's longest living comic strips. One was _Dream of the Rarebit Fiend_ published on September 10, 1904, which is just a comic about people eating a dish known as a Welsh rarebit, which is just melted cheese with other ingredients over slices of toasted bread, then they go to bed and start having nightmares and then the surreal thing will happen to them, whether it's them getting buried alive or something is happening to someone close to them and then the comics usually end with the person waking up, regretting that they've eaten the Rarebit. This comic series is often referred to as McCay's most surreal comics in all of his works before and after this and it's also consider a comic series that's made for more mature audience because of it's suggest themes and stories in some of these dreams. McCay continued the dream style of his comics, with his next biggest and longest running comic strip, _Little Nemo in Slumberland_ , published on October 15, 1905. The comic series, involves a little boy name Nemo who goes into a dream like land called Slumberland and would find himself in certain situations and would often end up waking up at the end of every last panel.

These comics were a lot more kid friendly than the Rarebit comics, and they also became very popular overtime. Little Nemo was also the first subject, McCay used for both his vaudeville act and animated film. Due to the interest he had when he saw his son, Robert McCay, playing with a flip book, McCay decided to try his hand at making an animated film using the same sort of technology that was use for the flip book. So he sent out and drew over 4000 pictures on a rice paper using the same type of art style, Art Nouveau, he's been using during is days as a comic strip artist. He put some marks on the top corners of the paper to put them on a registration, then he tested on how fluent his movement on the animations with a Mutoscope-like hand crank machine. The animation segments themselves is about 1 min and 30 seconds long, so McCay made some sort of background story on the animation project, in which he was making a bet with his friends that he could make his drawings move. The animation project was first released in theaters on April 8, 1911, then McCay use the animation film as part of his vaudeville act on April 12 of the same year. It was met with lots of praises and positive reviews from audiences, as this was something that no one as seen before and they were very impress, in fact they were so impressed that when McCay released his next animation project, _How a Mosquito Operates_ the following year, the audiences were convinced that McCay was just using some sort of special effects like wires or that he trace the drawing on some real life pictures of people or existing animals and that's way the drawings looked so realistic. So to proves to the people that he didn't use any sort of wires or tricks in is project, me made a hint to his audiences that his next animated project would be something serious, educational, and it's based on something that you could never find a real life photograph on.

So what did McCay use for his next project, well a dinosaur. Makes sense, when was the last time you saw a real photo of a dinosaur?

The dinosaur he used for this project was a Brontosaurus, as it was one of the earliest dinosaur bones shown in a museum at the time. McCay had already drawn a dinosaur before from his days working for the newspaper comics, but this was the first time he's ever animated one, in fact this is the first ever film to feature a dinosaur. This was McCay's most dedicated project he had ever worked on. He wanted to make sure that this project was perfect to him. There were a lot of first he did with this project, this was the first animated film to have a background and it was the first animated film to have something happening during the background, and because of the backgrounds themselve, the animated film used 10,000 drawings! Now that is dedication to your work.

It was also one the first animated films to have any sort of character. Before this most animated films were just a bunch of drawings doing something you can't do in real life, but with Gertie and McCay's previous animated film the Mosquito one, we now have a drawing having a sense of personally. In the case for Gertie, her character is like a little child or a trained puppy, in which she as her moments of throwing temper tantrums or evening crying after being scolded by McCay. To make sure Gertie would be accurate in her movement, McCay timed his owned breath to help him determine on how Gertie should breathe, but the one thing that made McCay and even the people at the museum stumped was on how an extinct like Gertie would be able to stand up from a lying position. So McCay made a flying creature while Gertie was standing up to distract the audiences for awhile.

Gertie was another big hit for McCay in both his Vaudeville act and in theaters. Audiences and critics went crazy for this short, they loved Gertie and the comedy this film had to offer, but McCay's employer at the New York American, William Hearst didn't like the fact that McCay's animation and his Vaudeville acts were keeping him away from his newspaper job, so McCay had to give his vaudeville acts, but he still made a few more animation films in the early 20s, until he also had to give that up as well, so any another project he had plan out, like a sequel for Gertie, never saw the light of day.

Today McCay is seen at the father of animation and he certainly improve a lot for the field of animations for which they would later inspired and also improved some more with future animators like Max Fleischer and Walt Disney. Most of his works, like so much of the other early films, can be seen on YouTube and also be brought for on DVD.


	7. World War I

Right Person: Alright, listen up everyone! We're facing today's fierce enemy, the leftist!

(Meanwhile on the other side)

Left Person: Alright, listen up everyone! We're going up against the racist white right people today!

Right Person: In order to protect these people, from the crazy leftist…!

Left Person: We must first show them are racist and dangerous they are!

Right Person: And in order to fulfill that gold…!

Left Person: We must…!

Left and Right Person: Do some propaganda!

World War 1

Now for those that thought that sketch was silly, stupid and maybe offensive with the stereotype; well welcome to propaganda, or at least welcome to the mind set when it comes to propaganda. Now propaganda is a way for someone to capture an audience with their heart and emotions to make them support one group of people and make them, in turn, to see the other group as some sort of threat. Now propaganda isn't just use for wars, it can also be used for religious reasons, political or even as something as basic as for sports, but really when we think of propaganda most people associate with war and it's no wonder, I mean even before we all these technologies, newspapers, T.V, movies, most people back then if they wanted to get other people involved in a war they had to get to them with their own words coming out of their mouth while still propagating their agenda. Now we have all these media programs and we have the internet in our own hands that you can make your own propaganda.

Anyway, back to the topic, today's propaganda we're going to be looking at, is propaganda for World War 1, specifically film propaganda and there's two reasons why this type of propaganda is important in terms of for the film industry.

One, this is the first time movies played a part in the propaganda game during an actual war that was going on at the time. Yes films were there during the 1890s and 1900s when other wars were happening around the world, but the movies were still very much at their early stages and there was little to no film propaganda at the time that a war was going on, or if there was not many people saw it at the time, and there were other forms of war propaganda like the _Romanian-Russo-Turkish_ made by Romania, but it was more or less like a documentary on how Romania got their independence. So this was the war that films played part in, in terms of propaganda the most.

Two, this was the true moment where people started to understand that a film can leave just as much of an emotion and impact from an audience as any other from of art, and even the government of these countries took notice of this. If they can somehow inform their people the way they want them to be informed about the war, then not only can they get some of these people to support the war, but to also join the war.

It's important to know that this war would also be the first time in film history where actors, actresses and even directors would leave just as much an impact on people and they would be treated as if they were just as important as a President or a politician. They would show up in public places or host live events and they would try to get their fans to support the war and their military and buy war bonds to help raise money for the military. Studios from around the world eventually caught on about using the films and their most popular stars as a way to get people involved in the war one way or another. So some government funded companies, like _Committee of Public Information, Department of Information,_ and _Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft_ were made to make newsreels and propaganda films, they had to get some footage from the war by either going to an actual trench fill war or from staging a trench fill and they basically pick and choose on what to keep and what to cut out of the reel.

People really wanted to know wanted to know how were things going on the front line and if any of their friends or love ones are doing great out there and film again was one of the best sort of media to get your information, because unlike newspapers that had only pictures and words, a film has moving picture and while some cameras were still a bit heavy to move, you could still bring your camera with you to the front line and capture any battle combat going on with your camera and actually show your audiences what is going in the war right now, but at a certain cost.

Like I said, while there were film propaganda on wars back than, most of them were either unknown or just a stage version, there weren't that many actual footage's on the actual wars that were going on at the time, so by the time World War 1 broke out, it became a little more easier to get actual war footage in real life, but you had to expect at least three things when capturing some war footage.

One, you had to get the OK from the government or the leader of the country if you wanted to go to an actual trench warfare and capture of actual war footage, even private companies had to be careful on how to show their footage with the audience so they don't cause a disruption or an outcry.

Two, and this one is obvious, but even if you had the okay with the government, be prepared to get hurt or at least be aware that you're putting your life on the line when getting some war footage. This is an actual real life war, these are not actors or this is not staged or anything and you can literally get yourself killed by doing this, and no one is going to think twice, so you had to be super extreme cautions when going out into the battlefield.

Three, even once you make it to the battlefield, get ready to be a little disappointed. Now at this point wars were often thought of as people just running head first into groups, and guns and cannons would go off, swords were being drawn and used, but that was far from the actual reality from the what was actually going on. There was little to almost no actual war combat what was happening. Most of the fighting took place in the trenches which started in late 1914, so most of the combat would take place underground with both sides hiding in the trenches while fighting the enemy and the directors and actors and even the government thought that it was boring and it would drive people away from the war if they knew the actual truth, so they had to play up the war a little bit more and make up some stuff to get more people into the war as soldiers or helpers. So what directors would do is that they would stage of fake war combat at a sensible and safe place and much like anything else in a movie, the actors would act up the war combat that people really wanted to see. Sometimes they would actually get actual soldiers and actual war scenes from the real places where the war was happening. For example in the British propaganda, _The Battle of the Somme,_ the first two reels of the film were scenes of actual and real war soldiers preparing themselves for war as they get their helmets on and they march proudly to fight the enemy. While the majority of the film after that was staged. Originally this feature film was actually supposed to be a couple of short films used for the British newsreels, but a person in the editing team, Charles Urban, suggested that the reels be turned into a feature film instead, and the British Topical Committee for War Films agreed to the change and it was met with a full house on it's premier in Britain so much that the even attracted middle class audiences and it box office hit.

Of course there were other propaganda films during World War 1. Some films would take place during the actual war itself, like D.W. Griffith's _Hearts of the World_ (1918), or Charlie Chaplin's _Shoulder Arms_ (1918). There are other propaganda films that would be more about the government and to get people to support the military and buy war bonds like Mary Pickford's _One Hundred Percent American_ (1918), and of course like any topics out there, you're going to have some opposing sides as well so there were some anti war films as well like _Civilization_ in which Jesus comes in and shows a king how war is bad. Yeah it's one of those types of movies.

Well regardless, even after the war was over, much the civil war or any films that dealt with previous wars, there were still many films about World War One after the war, again wither the war was the main part of the story or a side thing or it was pro war or anti war film, there were still plenty of World War one films and some of them we will actually get to talk about in the next decade, but it is important to know that this war was important for the movie and film industries as now people realized that you can use a film to capture the emotions and minds of an audience and that movies are not just mindless entertainment as some people thought they were. They can be use for something serious and make people think, something like books or songs where you can make and take them seriously, it just depends on the director and the movie itself, and this war would really make Hollywood one of the biggest movie industry of all time as we'll see in how film and movies would shape in other countries after the war was over, so we do have the Great War to thank for in some way.


	8. The Birth of Cinema

So far during the years of movies, we've had Georges Melies introducing the idea of editing, narrative and fictional stories and he was a big hit, especially with his films. Then we had Edwin Porter's _The Great Train Robbery_ which also introduced cross-cutting and on set location, was another big hit and became the first American blockbuster. Also in 1908 we had the first movie to have an original film score and screenplay with _The Assassination of the Duke of Guise_ and of course by the mid 1900s to early 1910s, we start to see the rise of feature films and how they became popular over time. So what happens when you take all those elements that people have learned over the years, put them in a blender, while also adding some historical and drama elements? You get _The Birth of a Nation_ one of the most biggest, hugest, and influential films of all time.

Whenever people study or look back on silent films, almost everyone mentions this film in one way shape or from and it's no real mystery has to why. This film broke a lot of new ground and pretty much change the game on how feature films should be present to everyone worldwide, but it also broke new grounds in a sense of conversational as well and the idea of movies and freedom of speech, but let's talk about how this movie was thought up in the first place and let's talk about the director himself as this will be important for this movie.

The director of _Birth of a Nation,_ David Wark Griffith, also known as D.W. Griffith, was born on January 22nd, 1872, on a family farm, in Crestwood, Kentucky. His family wasn't a rich family, they were a bit poor and they had to move out and sell the farm later in Griffith's life due to the family being in debt during Reconstruction. The only education that David received in his life was grade-school education with his older sister, Mattie, teaching him a few things, as well as his love of nineteenth century literature and works of the Bible and Shakespeare; and the theater was actually Griffith's most favorite pastime of all.

So D.W. Griffith drop out of school to help the family out, money wise, and listed in a bunch of jobs. From working in a bookstore or a dry good store, and eventually he would find himself working the theater as trying to be a play writer. He wrote a play in theater in 1907 called _A Fool and a Girl_ but it was panned by lots of people and critics so Griffith later went into filming, again trying to sell one of his plays for Biograph, but instead he was offered a chance to be an actor in Edwin Porter's short movie, _Rescued from an Eagle's Nest_ released in 1908.

About a year later when one of Biograph's main directors, Wallace McCutcheon was sick, Griffith was then given the opportunity to directed, which he gladly took and directed his first short film called _The Adventures of Dollie_ also released in 1908. After that he continue to direct and work for Biograph from there until 1913.

During his time in Biograph, he met some people that would later become very important to his work and also help them discovered their role in film business. This would include future director and cinematography G. W. Bitzer, Mary Pickford, Mack Sennett, Lillian Gish and many more. During his years as a director, Griffith would explore and expand the idea of a movie and the camera and what sort of edits and tricks can you do with this camera in your movies. Like I said, some of these innovate film techniques, like cross-cutting or flashbacks, or anything else were not that new. Some of them have been done before by other directors, but Griffith would expand on some of those techniques and use them frequently for his films in a way that fits with the story he wants to tell and he did help popularize them even more.

Now that's not to say Griffith didn't invent or make some new techniques in his films. One of the new techniques he introduced was a close up shot, starting in _The Lonedale Operator_ in 1911. Another innovative film technique he introduce was the follow-focus in _The Musketeers of Pig Alley_ which is also said to be an early gangster film.

Now like I said, because Biograph were still on the fence of having feature films in their studio, it would be hard for Griffith to make longer movies if he wanted to and there were lots of arguments between Griffith and Biograph, so Griffith left Biograph in 1913 after making his first feature film for them called _Judith of Bethulia_.

Later, after making two more feature films, he decided he wanted to do something special for this film, why? Well coming soon in 1915, it'll be the 60th anniversary of the end of the Civil War in America, and after reading a novel _The Clansman_ from a southern named Thomas Dixon, Griffith felt he found the right story to make and turn into a new feature film.

So what made these two people to make a movie like this in the first place? Well starting with D.W. Griffith's point of view, his father had fought in the Civil War on the Confederate side and Griffith has stated in interviews that when he was a child, he would hear stories from his father about what the civil war was like for him, he was also raise during the time when the Reconstruction era was coming to an end and Griffith had a couple of friends, southern friends, that would give their own opinion on what they though Reconstruction meant for them as well as what they thought about the free slaves and the Klan.

As for Thomas Dixon, what made him write the Reconstruction trilogy novels, was because of a play he saw on Harriet Stowe's _Uncle Tom's_ _Cabin_ , which many historians claim that this book was part of the piece that started the civil war. Anyway, Dixon didn't like the fact that this play was critically negative towards the south and felt like this play was spreading lies and false facts about the southerners and slavery, so he responded to the play by making these novels to which he felt were the true stories about what happened in the south and slavery.

After Dixon made the novels and play he wanted to bring and show his novels to a wider audiences, not just in America, but around the world as well, and he felt that film was the only way to meet his goal. So Dixon meet D.W. Griffith and showed him the novel and after reading the novel and showing interest in it, agreed to make the film and got the rights of the novel from Dixon and also agreed to give Dixon $10,000 for the rights of his play, but Griffith was only able to give Dixon about a quarter of the original payment, about $2,500, because of how much of the money he used for the budget of the movie which at first was $40,000, but later went up to $110,000. So Griffith said to Dixon, "Look, I'll give you 25% interest based on how much money this movie will make from the box office." Dixon was reluctant, but agreed and well let's just say he became a very rich man after the movie was released.

So with everything under control, Griffith went back to work on making his movie. He used the people that work with Griffith in the past, such as G. W. Bitzer, Lillian Gish, and so on. He also made up most of the scenes in his mind, so there was little to no script at all for this movie and he used most of the edits he used in his previous films, while also adding in new film techniques like night photography, panning shots, still shots, and even staging battle scenes in which he made hundreds of extras to look like there's actually thousands of them.

It was also one of the earliest films to have it's own score. Music composer, Joseph Carl Breil wrote a three hour music score for the whole film. He borrowed some scores of classical musicians such as _Symphony No. 6_ from Beethoven and _Ride of the Valkyries_ by Richard Wagner. Breil also borrow Southern folk songs into the movie such as _Dixie, The Star-Spangled Banner_ and he also made some original soundtracks such as _The Perfect Song_ which was use to portray the relationship between Elsie and Cameron.

The filming took about ten months to completed starting from January 1914, to October 1914 and after some editing, Griffith and his new company, Epoch Producing Company released the film in Los Angeles, on February 8, 1915.

Now this film really broke lots of new ground and gained lots and lots of attention from almost everyone worldwide. It was a huge success, probably the biggest successful movie that anyone in Hollywood and America as ever seen at that time. It gain lots of praises from both critics and audiences, calling the movie the greatest picture and greatest drama ever made, but it was also one of the first films to be subject into this idea of does freedom of speech apply to movies just like it does with books; because this film was also really criticizes by blacks and even whites alike for its extreme racist portrayal of blacks and making the KKK heroes and it's inaccuracy of both the Civil War and Reconstruction. Before the film premiered in theaters, the new from organization, the NAACP, protested against the film and try to get the film banned or at least censored a few scenes that involves blacks in a negative light.

Now this was not the first time that a film would evoke emotions out of people to the point where the film itself would become controversial. I've mention another film called _The Dreyfus Affair_ was one of the first films to have people debate over something that was actually happening by the time the film was released, but _The Birth of a Nation_ was much, much, much, higher in terms movies that tug at the emotions from people both happy and angry. The film was subject to many protest and riots.

One protest that was lead by William Monroe Trotter in Boston was turn into a riot, and there was another riot in Philadelphia that eventually the film was banned in places like Chicago, Missouri, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, ect, but it was only ban for a certain time until these places decided to show the film after all.

So after the NAACP's failed attempts to get the film ban, they decided to get some of the extreme scenes censored. Now before some of you think or say, "They can't do that, that's against freedom of speech." Well keep in mind, film was still a new concept to a lot of people and most of them were still in this mind set that films were there to be entertainment, they weren't seen as an art form. They were just seen as any other from of businesses, and there was a supreme court case just a few days after this film was released on this idea of films being included in freedom of speech.

A new formed film studio, Mutual Film Corporation, had argued in the case against Ohio that film was part of freedom of speech and that by having the state government issuing license fees and by having approval rating from the government as well as forcing the directors to make the changes or they could end up in jail for not going through the approval stage before they release their film was a violation of freedom of speech, but the court dismiss those claims stating that film is just a business and were not part of the press or as organs of public opinion and they also claim that films can be used for evil, so by a vote from 9-0 it was ruled that the first amendment would not be used to protect the freedom of speech from movies for a long time.

So basically if a city or a state wanted to banned for censor a movie they can do that and it happened with a lot of films and _Birth of a Nation_ was one of them, but that didn't stop the people to go and see the film, if fact this was the very first film to be shown in the White House under President Woodrow Wilson. Thanks to the help of Thomas Dixon, who knew Wilson from college, he was able to convince the President to see the movie and he said that the movie, "Was like writing history with lighting. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true." But it's also possible that it was a false report, and it was likely that it was Dixon that made the false quote, as Wilson's aide, Joseph Tumulty, has denied the claims and Wilson later called the movie an unfortunate production, but this movie was definitely the most watched movie ever in the history of film it was re-released three times, in 1924, 1931, and 1938, and by 1946 it's estimated that over 200,000,000 saw this film world wide and it's no surprise that the film made tons and tons of money. While we don't have the exact amount of money this movie made, it's safe to assume that the movie made over $11,000,000 world wide, the $10,000,000 coming from America and the other $1,000,000 coming from other countries.

This film showed lots of people that films were not just made to entertain; it show people that films can be made to both entertain and deliver a message or it can also be complex and at the time this was one of the most complex ever put out and lots of people drew their inspiration from this film to make their own films, even blacks drew their inspiration for making movies thanks to this film oddly enough. The films inspired people like Oscar Micheaux to make a movie called _Within Our Gates_ (1920) to countered Griffith's message in _Birth of a Nation_ and show people the struggles that blacks at to the deal with during the Jim Crow Era.

 _Birth of a Nation_ also helped influence the rise of something call race films. Basically these films were made specifically for African American audiences and they were usually star mostly black actors such as Paul Robeson and Louis Jordan and their purpose was to either show people, mostly black audiences because they were mostly shown in segregated theaters, but some of them were still shown in theaters regardless and most of time they would depict a theme of middle class people, mostly blacks, and showing the struggles that some of these people go through, like gangs, race violence, and sometimes it was just simple things, like romance and just a simple little comedy skits where they were move away from the stereotypical characters of these black character and give them a more human and a three dimensional character trait.

So in a way, we do have _Birth of a Nation_ to thank for influencing many blacks, in turn, to make their own films to counter argue messages from other films or to show they're side of the perspective lives and what they've experienced, but this film is also known on bringing back the Klu Klux Klan back during the 20s, as members of the group used this film as both a propaganda and reformation tool to bring in more and new members of the KKK, so that's another reason why this film gets lots of hate and yeah it is hard to ignore that fact while watching this movie.

Anyway, as for how Griffith responded to the critics and the riots, he was both surprise and sadden. He thought this film was showing the truth of history and couldn't understand why people hated the film, even going so far as to said that male blacks hated the movie because they wanted to marry white women. … Yes really. He would kept on saying that he was not a racist and even in the released on the film he would say "That the second half of the film is just part of history and it no way reflects on any race or people of today." And that… "We do not fear censorship, for we have no wish to offend with improprieties or obscenities, but we do demand, as a right, to show the dark side of wrong." He even offered anyone $10,000 if they can find any historical errors in film.

He really didn't know why people where so angry over this film and he didn't like that people were calling for censorship over this film and even express his opinion on it in a book he made a year after the film titled _The Rise and Fall of Free Speech in America_ voicing his thoughts and opinion on the whole idea of censorship how it helps to fuel both political means and prejudice.

Griffith also defended himself by the people accusing him at being a racist and decided that in order to answer his critics on their hatred for the movie, Griffith took a short film he was working on at the time and make three more stories and turn them into one feature film with all four stories focusing on one theme. … Intolerance.

 _Intolerance_ was another very important and innovative film to ever come out and it was released just a year after _The Birth of a Nation_. There were two inspirations that made Griffith direct this movie. One, of course, was the riots and the calling for censorship over his previous movie, _The Birth of a Nation_. Another was from an epic Italian film called _Cabiria_. _Cabiria_ is an Italian film that was released just a year before _Birth of a Nation_. The director of the film, Giovanni Pastrone, help popularize the tracking shot by adding something new. Now instead of having the camera moving along with the location or the film set, Pastrone introduce the "zoom" technique in which he had the camera either move towards to away from a scene, which Griffith really liked and decided to do that in his film for one of his stories.

Now like I said, this film was originally going to have one story and it was going to be a short film titled _The Mother and the Law,_ but after the success that _Birth_ had, Griffith decided to expand the story a lot more and put three more stories into the film. So here we have a film that has four different stories and each of the stories revolves around the same theme of intolerant people, that kind of stuff was unheard of back then. So it's no surprise that this film was very expensive to make, even more expensive than _Birth of a Nation_. The film as a whole cost $2,000,000 for Griffith and a third of that budget went to the Babylonian story, which was one of the four stories in the movie, he used it for the sets and the actors as well.

Sadly, though, this movie did not meet the same praise or even commercial success that _Birth of a Nation_ got. Now there were still some people that liked the film, but one of the possible reasons that this film didn't good so well was like I said, the idea of four stories at the same time in one feature film was very new and complex to most people at the time that they didn't get it. Also another possible reason for the bit of box office failure was both Griffith expensive payment to have a live orchestra for the film and it was also because that by the time the film came out, Americans were pretty much in the mindset of fighting the Germans in World War one, so they didn't like Griffith's pacifist themes in the film. Now the film wasn't a complete bomb, it did make some money, about $1,000,000. So it wasn't that big of a failure and nowadays both _Birth of a Nation_ and _Intolerance_ set the stage for how future films, especially feature films should be made, and both of these movies are still talked about and studied by every film class you can imagine. They both had complex story, they at some advanced camera and editing work and they were both really epic films that now people didn't just saw films as pointless entertainment, they saw them as art now and a lot of directors would take note and be inspired by these movies to make their own movies and make them just as grand and epic as before. How did they do it? Well you'll just have to find out in the next decade, the 20s.


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